Yesterday Coupa announced its latest release, Coupa 10. The above linked press release provides the high-level details of the new release, but the nuance and rate of innovation in Coupa 10 is surprising and can’t be captured by headlines, even given Coupa’s historical rate of innovation. In this release, for example, Coupa has unveiled a more than truly basic sourcing application for the company masses, as well as brought its invoice / accounts payable automation and e-invoicing capability to a level where it can now compete against specialists (a huge accomplishment in such a short time period considering the limitations in earlier releases, just quarters ago).

We’ll be covering the release elements in detail next week and the following on Spend Matters for our subscribers on PRO / Plus, including a deeper-dive look at the sourcing capabilities as well as some of the new shopping and item labeling elements of the tool (the latter of which are charmingly disarming and clever – the type of features that don’t matter much on a checklist perspective because no one else has them, but that actually might tip the scales in Coupa’s favor in a competitive selection).

Here’s some cut and paste from the press release on the new features minus the marketing adjectives and adverbs:

New expense reporting and integration with corporate cards

Automated accounts payable reconciliation

Cool and clever (our words, not Coupa’s) shopping and item tagging/labeling and comparison capabilities – stuff we wish we thought of ourselves

Vastly improved invoicing interface and capability. From the Coupa marketing politburo: “Employees can increase their efficiency when reviewing a large volume of invoices through a streamlined user experience, mass actions for review and approval, and split screens for viewing scanned invoices alongside invoice fields for quick comparison [side by side and cross checks] prior to taking final approval action.”

More mobile stuff

In short, Coupa 10 proves this cat is real, and has much larger teeth than many bigger animals in the procurement vendor forest. The combination of big improvements to invoicing and a new sourcing application in a single release – combined with the shopping improvements – is what sold us on this new Darwinian development. Without mincing words, we challenge Ariba/SAP and Oracle to bring innovation at even half the speed Coupa is showing on the integrated source-to-pay suite front.

Moreover, Coupa now has established a track record of bringing new modules to market that materially trail the market leaders initially and then within 12 months of updated releases, totally bring the basics up to snuff while building in cleverness that can overcome the Feature 500 battle in some cases (not all, but some). And all these new areas are designed to work from the ground up with everything else Coupa has – a huge benefit in the kludged world of ERP, IBM, and Ariba architectures and suite integration (which don’t have fully integrated suites, despite the marketing).

Mark our words. With its latest Release 10, provided there is adequate sales and marketing support, Coupa will further solidify its lead against all others in new wins in the middle market and smaller end of the Fortune 500/Global 2000. And if they can prove scale, depth, and greater customization (i.e., more configurability) in larger companies, they’ll continue giving the bigger names a run for their money there as well – but don’t count your cards in the top end of the Fortune 500 or so for Coupa as the winner just yet. That’s competitive, unproven territory where Coupa still trails in the current deal book, and the Wild West P2P battle is just starting to unfold.

Alas, who can catch Coupa from an integrated suite perspective? We’ll share our thoughts on the best of breed front (including some providers from abroad who are not as well known as they should be) and what the ERPs might have up their sleeve to our subscribers in the coming weeks.